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posted on 01 July 2008 12:58

Consulting is a leading UK provider of consulting and professional support services. Tribal help a wide range of clients - over 2,500 in the public sector alone - improve the quality of their services to customers.

Tribal’s assignments affect how essential services are delivered every day, services which are central to well-being and quality of life: attractive and affordable housing, 21st-century hospital treatment, care for the sick and elderly, safe and clean neighbourhoods, high standards in education and lifelong opportunities for learning and self-improvement.

Tribal’s clients include central government departments, local authorities, housing associations, schools, colleges and universities, the NHS and primary care trusts, as well as the private, not-for-profit and third sectors.

Mohammed Raziq, Data Centre Manager, Tribal Consulting said, “One of our IT department’s many responsibilities is to ensure that company data is protected, this includes data stored on our consultants laptops and desktop machines. Of course this is an immense challenge as users very often delete or overwrite data. I couldn’t count the number of helpdesk calls we have had where a user has accidentally deleted an essential word document or presentation, or even worse, that their laptop has been lost or stolen! We help as much as possible but there isn't much we can do (besides offering a sympathetic ear) when a machine is stolen or the user has deleted a document last week and has only just realised.”

Devon-based Grey Matter, a Yosemite Technologies reseller, advised Yosemite’s FileKeeper Corporate backup and recovery solution that uses CDP (Continuous Data Protection) technology. Yosemite FileKeeper Corporate provides organisations with secure and transparent protection of user data for laptops and desktops running at the edge of their network, maintained with centralised policies. FileKeeper's technology protects every document a user edits at the instant they save to disk, regardless of where the documents are stored or whether the system is connected to the network.

Historically it has been very difficult to protect data on laptops. Tribal Consulting had tried many technical solutions including Offline Folders, CommVault, Backup Exec, ViceVersa, SyncToy, Laptop Backup and numerous others, however all of these solutions had been difficult to manage and had never given Tribal the reassurance that it had 100% of its data secured.

Tribal Consulting run a Windows 2003 domain with a dedicated MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) system serving its 15 sites within the larger Tribal business group of 55 sites and 2500 users. Tribal used to provide a USB drive and ask its 550 users to back up to a regular schedule. As could be expected users’ backups were haphazard and irregular. Even when backups had been taken the recovery solutions used were often difficult to employ and made file retrieval a difficult task.

Mohammed continues, “We first read about Yosemite FileKeeper through a fantastic review of the product. We tested FileKeeper internally within the Tribal Consulting IT department and the general user feedback was that it was ‘absolutely brilliant’. We rolled it out to approximately 550 users over just six weeks, with no manual installs- all done automatically with Yosemite’s automated installer. This was an enormously fantastic achievement when you consider our widely dispersed user base, spread out over many sites and rarely coming into the IT department with their laptops.

We now use FileKeeper to ensure that essential company data has been backed up on all laptops/desktops. User feedback for the product has been very positive and the number of helpdesk calls for data recovery has dropped dramatically as users now have the ability to recover their own files. Some of the feedback comments from our users have been very reassuring:

User 1: “I find it a reassurance to have this programme, knowing that I do not have to 'remember' to back-up and having the assurance that I can retrieve a file if the need arises, from any location I happen to be in.”

User 2: “This works well and gives me confidence to know that any errors I may make on a file, or a file corruption, can be corrected by restoring at the required point.”

Ask any IT administrator how easy it is to install programs on laptop users’ machines and they’ll tell you that it’s a logistical nightmare. Tribal Consulting remote users move around the country visiting local offices. They rarely have time for IT to install programs on their machines. Some consultants may come into an office only once a month, however they do VPN into the office regularly. The Yosemite deployment tool made installation across the domain easy, and Tribal managed to silently install 512 machines.

Tribal now intend to continue deployment of Yosemite FileKeeper to the rest of the group, some 2500 users.

Mohammed continues, “Our experience of backup and recovery solutions prior to Yosemite was not good; solutions were either hard to use or they over-notified users and wasted time. Some needed a constant link to the servers and consumed an excessive amount of bandwidth, especially if scheduling meant that many users backed up simultaneously. The great thing about FileKeeper is that it monitors the network allocation and controls how much bandwidth is allotted at any one time so to eliminate this negative impact.”

“A problem we had with other solutions was that of discriminating between files the business needed to back up and the personal files that inevitably get moved onto laptops when they are away from the office. Tribal allow personal use within set guidelines but we do not want to be backing up files for no business benefit and potentially causing ourselves compliance issues down the line. FileKeeper’s policy controls allow us to say which file types get backed up and which are excluded, cutting down our storage needs and keeping the business secure from both potentially malicious files and from material that should not been on the corporate network.”

“We are also able to generate a monthly report listing the machines that have not been fully backed up, allowing us to contact the users to encourage them to connect to the network and backup their files,” concludes Mohammed.

Furthermore Tribal Consulting has benefited from FileKeeper’s advanced reporting functions which alert users when hard disk space becomes low so that action can be taken.

File recoveries are simple and easy using FileKeeper's intuitive, context-sensitive right-click menus that virtually eliminate file recovery-based Help Desk calls. With FileKeeper Corporate, businesses extend the existing backup and recovery of core systems to the edge, resulting in total data protection.

About Grey Matter
Since 1983 Grey Matter has provided independent and trusted software know-how for customers exploring solutions to their business, technical and development requirements.

For more information about Grey Matter, visit our web site at www.greymatter.com.

About Yosemite Technologies

Yosemite Technologies is a global provider of data protection software solutions that span from the laptop to the data center. Yosemite develops solutions that protect environments running Microsoft® Windows, Linux, and NetWare®. Yosemite's flagship product, Yosemite Backup™, represents the next generation of backup software with Self Tuning Logic™ for fast backup and restore operations and an integrated Virtual Library option, D2D2Ne™, that provides multi-level, heterogeneous 'disk to disk to any' backup. The FileKeeper family of products protects laptops and desktops with “always on” data protection ranging from Small or Home Offices all the way to the Enterprise. Yosemite has developed strong technology and channel partnerships with leading companies including HP, Dell, Microsoft, Tandberg, MAXDATA and CoreMicro. The company's commitment to Backup Simplified™ represents Yosemite's focus on delivering products that offer unmatched performance, ease-of-use and value.

For more information, visit www.yosemitetech.com.

^{[Formatted by Paul Warren.]}